I need assistance, so I'm not sure if this is the right forum section, but it's peripherally related.

Basically there's an old homebrew/hack of the excellent Asuka 120% Burning Fest 2D fighter for Saturn. It was done back when the game came out, by fans, before people did that sort of thing. Pretty advanced for the time I'd say, and from what I hear, the hack tweaked/balanced the gameplay, added some moves, and things like that.

It's called Asuka 120% Limit Over. The problem is I've never played it. Neither has anybody else that I know of. The reason is that the iso is burned in some obscure old version of Nero that only runs on Windows 95. There are some other limitations as well...I know my site-mate vincent tried a number of things and failed.

So I'm wondering if anyone here wants to take a swing at it, so we can get this thing out for people to play?

I can take a swing at it. Any idea if it'll run on an emulator, or will i have to mod one of my saturns?

This sort of thing is something of a specialty for me...

I guess while i'm here, i'll make my standard offer. In the past, i have taken games that are locked out with some sort of password or memory card save lock. I offer this service for free and do not retain any copies of the game unless requested by the owner.

I have had some mild success in recovering damaged CD/DVD based protos as well.

it should run on an emulator, I'd guess. the main thing is the extraction, and I believe there's also an issue where you may have to burn the file onto a disc, then either run it from there, or re-extract to a modern format.

Well - in conclusion, I'd like to ask for your help. What's the best way to contact you? Or you can just email me at brandon @ insertcredit.com

Screwing around with the patch files, and playing with some dll's from windows 95, i'm able to get the patch running. My japanese is non-existent, but from what i'm able to gather, i should be able to apply the patches to the game.

I've also figured out how to create a more modern auto-patcher that will run on 2000, XP or vista. This should let the patch live for a few more years anyway.

This will also give the option of distributing the patched game as a patch against the iso (semi-legal), or as the complete patched iso itself (illegal).

What i'm waiting on:

I'm bidding on the only copy of this game on ebay right now. So if anyone snipes me, i'll kill you.

Once i have the game in hand, I should be able to test all this to make sure it works as i think it does.

Alright, CD patched... Now i just have to reassemble the saturn iso (have to rip the music, burn it, reattach it to the image). I'll be doing that later tonight.

I know this sounds stupid, but could someone please explain to me how to run a saturn emulator? Please use small words and speak slowly. And perhaps a power point presentation so i can follow along? I don't fucking get it...

Either that, or i'm going to have to figure out how to do the swap trick... i already have 2 broken saturns, i only have one left and i'd rather not screw with it if possible...

This is a superb emu. Disregard the old GiriGiri crap and the hacks.
In SSF settings, just point to the virtual DVD drive assigned to the Alcohol 120% or Daemon drive, mount the image and thats it. SSF supports .nrg, .iso, and bin/cue.
I suggest to use bin/cue of this game for best results.
Make sure the audio tracks are converted to .wav files, make sure cue sheet is in order (iso/wav), use Sega Cue maker.
Any questions?

SSF was erroring out on me until i actually loaded a driver for my sound card. Now when i go into the options screen and save the changes it gives me an error that says SSF????? and then a black screen (numbers at the top are doing things tho).

Yes, well i should have mentioned BIOS. But that's kinda scary to mention on here blah blah. Ok now whats happening? Did you load the imga of the hacked game onto the virtual drive and then start SSF?
SSF automatically opens it. Make sure in config, that you may need to point to JAPAN and not EUR or USA.

Whenever i load an image of the patched version of the game, SSF comes back and tells me "Disc unsuitable for this system". When i use the same procedures to create an iso of the unpatched version, it works fine.

Either the emulator supports the unpatched game but fails at the patched version (unlikely), or the patch doesn't actually work and just corrupts the files. The other option is that i'm missing something obvious, which is entirely possible since it's 4:00am. I'll look over this again tomorrow.

A translated copy of the docs that came with the patch would probably be helpful right about now. They went into some detail on how to burn the file after patching, which babblefish completely failed at figuring out...

If your fear is that the emulator won't run the patched copy, you could easily rule that out by putting the disc in a physical drive and point your Emu to that drive instead of the virtual drive. I do this all the time so I don't have to actually pull out old systems and hook them up when I'm feeling particularly lazy.

I tried the whole thing over from scratch, even using a different computer and still no luck. I tried using the swap trick to get it to play on a real saturn, and that didn't work either.
When you run the patch, it does a check to make sure the file was patched right, so i'm fairly certain that part worked. Only thing i can imagine is that there's some step i'm missing out of the japanese instructions...

Wow, that old ssf site is still updated? I named my own variation on a theme from that place cause I thought its dead.

BTW if you hold CTRL while SSF starts up, it will bypass the BIOS and use automatic region selection. Can you share the patch files, or list the instructions? Someone with more japanese knowledge may be able to get it working.

My isos didn't work because they didn't have valid boot sectors. Considering how advanced the tools were in 1998, i figured there had to be instructions for making the boot sector in the documentation. So i ran it through babelfish again. I found out that the archive of the geocities webpage was missing a critical file called a120boot.lzh . This archive held the boot patching application. A google search came up with nothing, there didn't seem to be any records of this hack anywhere on the net. Certainly it couldn't have survived for 9 years on the intertubes?

Well, i went back to patching the boot sector in a hex editor. Flipping through tabs on my browser i found i had left the google search open, i decided to try one more search, this time removing the file extension. It came up with 1 result, the original webpage on a new host.

So now i have the boot sector patch. I start from the beginning, follow each step on the site exactly as they claim (aside from the part about sea urchins... no, really... there's something about sea urchins according to babelfish).

Still doesn't work, same error as before "Disc unsuitable for this system".

I've uploaded a "fixed" version of the patch file if anyone else wants to try their hand.

SSF is pretty damn picky about cd images. I know it doesn't even like region hacked games. You might try using some saturn dev tools to create the image. There's a suite called Virtual CD software over at sega xtreme for making disk images. I don't really have time to look at it but maybe you could figure it out.

You might be able to copy the bootsector over from a valid ISO of the game; that worked for me when I was playing around with a hack of Magic Knight Rayearth. I ripped it based on the instructions from this site; for patching, you can probably just use a hex editor with overwrite turned on, set the cursor to the beginning of the ISO, and paste the IP.BIN you ripped from the original Asuka 120% CD.